Briefly: Nine Inch Nails, Frank Black, Bad Brains, Bobby 'Boris' Pickett
Nine Inch Nails treated a select group of fans to a secret concert at a Los Angeles warehouse last week, an event that was staged to further the plotline of the group's recently released concept album, "Year Zero."
According to accounts posted at the NIN fan website Echoing the Sound and video footage of the event posted at Open Source Resistance, about 50 fans were gathered, loaded on a bus with blacked-out windows, transported to the warehouse and subjected to a speech by the man purportedly behind the OSR website. Attendees were then led to the basement via a freight elevator, where they discovered a stage.
There, NIN gave a surprise, six-song performance that ended when what appears in the video footage to be a SWAT team--similar to the one featured in the music video for NIN's latest single, "Survivalism--raided the show and apprehended the band as the audience was herded out through marked "exit" doors.
"Frank Black 93-03," a chronological anthology of the Pixies' frontman's nine solo albums encompassed in that time period, will arrive in stores June 12 through Cooking Vinyl records, according to a press release. The two-disc set will include a bonus CD of live tracks recorded during Black's Fall 2006 North American tour, as well as a new track titled "Threshold Apprehension," taken from hiss forthcoming studio album, "Bluefinger," due out in September.
"There is totally a narrative arc to my solo career," Black said in a statement. "It sounds trite, but in basic language this is what's happening on these songs: it's me breaking away from the Pixies and finding myself as a solo artist, finding a band again and forging that together, then losing it and my marriage, and finally getting my obsession with two-track recording out of my system. It's a total arc."
Veteran punk rockers Bad Brains tour dates, tickets and news" style="color:#630000;">Bad Brains have set a June 26 release date for "Build a Nation," which the group's label, Megaforce Records, bills in a press release as the "first proper Bad Brains studio album in over a decade." The set--which was produced by Adam Yauch of Beastie Boys--features all of the group's original members: HR, Darryl Jenifer, Dr. Know and Earl Hudson.
"The Brains are one of most powerful and unique bands in the world," Yauch said in a prepared statement. "They have been a huge influence on me, and it was an honor to work with them on this record."
Bobby "Boris" Pickett , best known for his early '60s hit "Monster Mash," died of leukemia Wednesday (4/25) in Los Angeles, according to published reports. He was 69.
Pickett's enduring, Halloween-time hit earned him the nickname Bobby "Boris" Pickett for a lead-vocal track that found the singer impersonating horror-film actor Boris Karloff.
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